So it's been four days since Microsoft finally showed us the Xbox One, and I'm still kind of stuck on how little of that hour-long event was actually about games. I watched the livestream Tuesday morning with coffee instead of doing literally any of the work I was supposed to be doing, and by the end I'd seen exactly one game trailer. One. A brief Call of Duty: Ghosts tease right at the close, like an afterthought tacked onto a keynote about television.
Because that's what this was, mostly. A television keynote. Steve Ballmer got up there and talked about "the best entertainment system" like he was pitching a cable package, and at one point NFL commissioner Roger Goodell walked out on stage. At a video game console reveal. To talk about fantasy football integration and some partnership around Xbox and the NFL. I don't dislike football, I just don't get why the guy who runs the league was standing in front of a room full of people who showed up expecting to hear about games.
The hardware itself is fine, as far as anyone can tell from a press event with no hands-on time. Eight-core custom chip, 8 gigs of RAM, a Blu-ray drive finally (the 360 never got one, which always felt like a strange thing to skip for eight years), and a new Kinect that's supposedly always watching and listening so you can just say "Xbox on" instead of reaching for a controller. The box itself looks like a black VCR someone left under the TV, wider than it is tall, with vents on top. Not ugly exactly. Just not exciting, and not something I'd have guessed was a game console from a photo alone.
What bugs me more is what they didn't say. No price. No actual release date beyond "holiday 2013," which could mean October or could mean the week before Christmas for all anyone knows. No real look at what you'd actually be playing on this thing besides that one CoD clip and a passing mention that 343 Industries is "working on something." Great, thanks. I've been reading through the reaction threads since Tuesday and the general mood is somewhere between confused and annoyed, which tracks with how I felt watching it live with my coffee going cold.
I'll say this for Sony: whatever the PS4 turns out to be, they at least led with games back in February. Microsoft had a full hour and chose sports and TV apps instead. Maybe that's the actual strategy, some bet on the console as a living room hub rather than a games machine first, and if so, fine, that's a legitimate thing to build toward. But then don't bill the event as a reveal for people who care about games and then spend forty-five minutes on Skype integration and ESPN.
It's a long weekend coming up, Memorial Day is Monday, in case your calendar looks like mine and is just a wall of half-finished tasks with nothing crossed off. I'm planning to spend approximately none of it thinking about game consoles that won't ship for another six months at minimum. My actual plan involves the grill, a cooler, and no screen bigger than my phone if I can help it. We'll presumably get real information at E3 next month, actual games, an actual price, and I'd bet a lot of people end up with a very different opinion than the one Twitter formed in the twenty minutes right after Tuesday's event wrapped. First impressions are usually wrong in both directions. This one, though, I don't think I'm wrong about. Bring the games next time.